Abstract [en]

This article presents a full-length Finnish version of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), comprising 66 primes and a list of canonical sentences. It considers the notion of primes and their identification. It presents the main principles of NSM and gives instructions and examples. It shows that the Finnish-based NSM corresponds to versions based on other languages, is translatable into them and lends itself well to semantic analysis. The article briefly presents the concepts of molecule and allolexy and gives examples of them. It also presents observations on how to conduct semantic analysis with the NSM method, concerning, among other things, the kind of words which lend themselves best to an NSM analysis, the kind of evidence an NSM analysis should be based on and the question why some NSM definitions do not fully adhere to rules. It gives examples of NSM definitions translated from English into Finnish (e.g. the verb to promise) and of NSM definitions written in Finnish (e.g. the verb nalkuttaa ‘to nag’). It also considers how to translate NSM terminology from English into Finnish, how to document the steps leading to an NSM definition and how to combine the NSM method with other methods of semantic analysis.